Los Angeles Times' Scores

For 16,533 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 56% higher than the average critic
  • 6% same as the average critic
  • 38% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 Sand Storm
Lowest review score: 0 Saw VI
Score distribution:
16533 movie reviews
  1. With a formidable presence that mainlines emotional intensity, Devos dominates this film, appearing in almost every scene, but she has key support from another of France's most accomplished actresses: the enigmatic, four-time Cesar winner Nathalie Baye.
  2. While Hamm and Bateman have the right idea overall, their love of contrivance too often gives The Journey the sense of being reverse-engineered to explain a breakthrough rather than driven by the messy, human possibilities of their what-if.
  3. The fascination and at times the frustration of her achievement is that she has drained away some of the story’s juiciest, most suspenseful elements.... There is compromise in all this narrative subtraction, but there is also purpose.
  4. As its title indicates, My Journey Through French Cinema is personal with a capital “P,” a passionate, opinionated, drop-dead fascinating documentary essay about that country’s film history put together by a clear-eyed enthusiast who was born to tell the tale.
  5. Amirpour has vision to burn, and inside this not-so-bad batch of splendid atmospherics and half-baked ideas is a leaner, sharper movie trying to chew its way out.
  6. Thanks to three lively lead performances and smart storytelling choices, what could have been a distasteful premise becomes surprisingly entertaining.
  7. Cohn’s slickly edited verité-style storytelling lets each person’s humanity rise to the top, just enough to mix expected poignancy with a simple clarity about the struggles of low-income, opportunity-challenged souls.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nobody Speak drifts at times and lacks sweep and historical perspective. But it is a troubling foreshadowing of things to come if journalists are threatened, sidelined or attacked by powerful institutions and people more concerned with their own interests than what’s best for the country or communities.
  8. The Big Sick is both a delightful comedy and an imperfect milestone. With any luck, we’ll look back on it someday and it won’t feel like a milestone at all.
  9. The film effectively summons an evocative moment in time. But...the film ultimately feels like a marketing tool for ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.
  10. The House on Coco Road is a remarkable document of how social forces affected the lives of Baker and his ancestors. It might lack the scope to encompass all of the story it wants to tell, but it’s a compelling conversation starter.
  11. The documentary by Frank Dietz and Trish Geiger is big on enthusiasm though it ultimately lacks depth.
  12. The film is a moving experience for both its subjects and the audience.
  13. If the film’s trio of new screenwriters (replacing series mainstay Ehren Kruger) have seamlessly upheld the crass and juvenile “Transformers” sensibility, then Bay’s visual sensibility has, if anything, matured, to the point of demanding and earning your exasperated surrender.
  14. 47 Meters Down doesn't have the campy sparkle that made “The Shallows” a cult hit, but it's the kind of cheesy thriller that's good for a few jumps and a few chuckles at its own silliness.
  15. More specific sense of time and route (a map, anyone?) and a bit of even basic scientific scrutiny would have improved this otherwise compelling and provocative journey.
  16. It’s a gutsy, often off-putting piece whose eccentric little New York story and experimental vibe might have been better served by a short film.
  17. The drought is ultimately presented as a man-made occurrence, wrapped up in regulations and red tape, rather than a troubling environmental reality. The reality is far more complicated than anything that can be neatly wrapped up within the conventions of genre filmmaking.
  18. Hearing Is Believing could have offered more insight into Rachel’s experience, but instead it invests in the action of its title, including long stretches of witnessing Rachel at the piano and on various other instruments.
  19. A wincingly unfunny comedy caper.
  20. Moscow Never Sleeps is well made but stilted, following too many characters to give any their due.
  21. "Stefan Zweig" is only Schrader's second film as a director, but, armed with clear ideas of what she wanted to convey and how she wanted to convey it, she's made a movie that allows its actors to fully inhabit their characters in a potent but low-key way.
  22. Even when the movie shades too far into the oblique or the obvious, its evocative scenes of urban life and Tobin’s powerful performance provide ample compensation. Plot twists or no, this is a vivid depiction of a lost soul.
  23. Unlike the thick directness in Maud’s work, the movie about her is almost pointillist in detailing the tiny steps that make up an enduring marriage.
  24. At no point do the filmmakers seem to evince any real interest in the emotional misery they inflict on their characters; trauma here is just the quickest means to an uplifting end, or in this case, a montage’s worth of wretched epiphanies.
  25. The title of this strenuously crude and crotch-obsessed movie may be lazy, but it’s also pretty apt.
  26. This warmly sentimental G-rated film about facing new realities and recapturing lost dreams has, despite its relatively adult story line, a beguilingly effortless feeling to it, as if it had nothing to prove.
  27. The thrilling documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time is indescribable not because it's ambiguous (it's totally straightforward) but because it does so many things so beautifully it is hard to know where to begin.
  28. While it’s a cute love letter to a certain strip of L.A., and Annenberg brings a winsomeness to her role, the story is thin and clichéd, relying on tired gags and stereotypes for humor.
  29. It’s an illogical, simple-minded mess in which Stevens is primarily a disembodied voice in a first-person-shooter-style video game movie.

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